Firstly, Solaris has sucked for a long time on the x86 platform. Maybe people will drop OSs like bad habits, but not hardware platforms.
Secondly, linux has a huge amount of momentum in the open source community. Arguably it is killing even the BSDs. It is doubtful that a newly opened OS could take away much of the mindshare at this point - the people working on linux have invested to much of themselves just to drop it.
Sun is a boutique platform vendor. To be a boutique vendor you have to provide some substantial unique gain over commodity products, be it either in price, performance, software availability, or service.
Sun is the next SGI. They're hosed.
McNealy needs to put results on the balance sheet NOW, not in two years, NOW. That means dumping anything that is not a cash cow. Shareholders want this mean's head on a plate and he can't afford to look much further than the next two quarters for some relief.
The long term vision is all well and good, but Sun stock is taking a beating, server sales are down and they are losing market share. The pressure is on McNealy to act fast to get Sun hardware and software sales up, not to promote some altruistic future vision. He knows this. So did Zander, and so did the linux guy who left. Their departures are no coincidence - look to see Sun go on the attack in the short term against anything but Sparc/Solaris. Anything but and there is going to be a shareholder revolt with McNealy's head on a plater.
Sun must factor in the cost of developing an entire platform into the per unit cost. They can't leverage the entire economy of technology that linux can (Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, IBM). So inherently they are going to lose on cost. Now they are also losing on performance, and when you are a boutique solution, you cannot get outperformed.
Sun is simply in a no-win situation. They are the next SGI.
They're damned if the support linux, damned if they don't. Supporting linux completely erodes the entire reason Sun has gone the proprietary route - controlling the platform.
Not supporting linux means fighting not just one or two companies, but an entire economy. Intel. AMD. IBM. HP. Dell. There's just no way that Sun can win this battle. None.
The bottom line is that any platform business is hosed once their platform falls from grace. SGI is a classic example.
Manned orbital flight is pretty well handled with the ISS and the Russians have a cheaper, time proven method of transport to/from ISS that is pretty hard to beat.
First off, how is the ISS a solution to manned orbital flight??? Secondly, giving up manned spaceflight to the Russians is idiotic on many levels.
They aren't dependable.
They don't have the funding to pursue future programs.
Really, you must realize that the range of companies who can bid on this type of project is very limited, and that obviously the government wishes to spread the mindshare for this project over mutliple vendors if possible.
Large scale aerospace and military projects have operated as such for decades. This really isn't news.
From what I could see from the photos, tthe Boeing stages appear to be identical (?), which would be a huge cost-savings in terms of parts reuse, interchangeability, etc.
Its true though that all of the designs share some characteristics...one stage to get you off the gorund, one to get you into orbit. Obviously this isn't by accident...the physics of the problem and materials/fuel presently available must dictate this design.
The Russian Buran program was based on what the Russians thought the US space shuttle was. They were unable to duplicate the effort and Buran was never practically employed.
It now sits as an amusement park exhibit that you can walk through, and as for it "not flying anymore"...well, it never really flew in the first place in a practical sense.
I don't know why people constantly bring up Buran. There is no comparison between this pseudo-prototype craft that was never practically used, and the shuttle, which has over two decades of nearly perfect mission records.
You are totally ill-informed re Buran. The Russians never made meaningful use of this design and there was only one semi-functional prototype built. You can now tour it for a few dollars outside of Moscow, but hurry up, its falling apart quickly and even the carival hucksters who own it are getting tired of it.
I hear these gripes all of the time...but who is the US in a race with? The Russians can barely afford to pay for anything on the ground let alone in space. The Chinese are at least fifteen years off of anything serious in the way of manned spaceflight. The Euros? The Japanese?
So please tell me why the shuttles are an embarassment. As far as I can see they're still the only space craft that lands on wheels.
For all of the posters who are going to respond with "Java can possibly be faster than C"...well, a color television could also possibly spontaneously appear at the event horizon of a black hole, but that doesn't mean that this actually ever happens.
Every time someone trumps up the merits of their language, they always mention that it is (potentially) faster than C. This has been uttered so many times that I don't know why anyone uses C at all, it clearly has terrible performance (according to all the language advocates).
I'm calling your bluff. Give me some stats for example programs.
Maybe someone can confirm this, but the latest.Net SDK does not seem to provide support for the STL.
Otherwise, the STL is an excellent set of libraries to move the OO paradigm towards parameterized types.
Of course like the rest of C++, you pay a price in comprehension...this language exposes everthing to you and you will pay a price in development and comprehension time.
There really isn't a controversy surrounding Yucca Mountain - the federal government is going to take a mountain in an area that has already been nuked to death and store waste there. Sure there are protests, but in reality the government made the final decision on Yucca Mountain the moment they proposed the project.
Any dissnet at the state level is going to be overridden at the federal level. Yucca Mountain is a done deal.
I'm glad to see people finally start dealing with the very toxic waste produced by computers. The old maxim of waste managemen, "reduce, reuse, recycle" really is apt.
We should be reducing our consumption of computing equipment, and thankfully huge performance gains in recent years allow us to own them longer.
Reuse is a great second consideration. You probably have very high standards for you computer's performance...but I bet you neighbor doesn't! GIve the damn thing away to someone who can make real use of it.
Finally recycle. A great first-step approach here would be to start a business that takes disposed of computers, strips them down and uses the parts to create ultra-low-price boxes that can be resold. For example - consider two individuals discarding PCs because of resource starvation in one aspect of their systems. Jimmy drops of a Pentium with a twenty GB hard drive. Ann drops off a PIII with hardly any disk space. Well, combine Jimmy's disk with Ann's CPU and you have the start of a PC that you could actually sell for maybe $200. Of course you would be obligated to cleanly dispose of the parts you don't use, but you get the idea. I'm surprised someone hasn't tried this.
Your post makes no sense. Look at the top ten best performing CPUs on the market. Now tell me what happened to all of these clean architectures that were supposed to destroy x86.
Whats the issue? It doesn't look like other vendors get appreciably greater performance out of "cleaner" architectures. Yes the Power4 is faster, but take that off of the list and you'll see AMD and Intel all over the performance charts.
Viruses aren't scary because we haven't put essential resources on the public network yet. Wait until your home security system is IP addressable, or any other of the countless "essentials" people plan to wire up.
The story that I heard was that this type of system had been planned for years but cabbie groups had lobbied city hall to stall it.
Re:Web Services is Hype
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It doesn't offer anything new that couldn't be done with rpc.
No one is claiming that it isn't rpc, but it is an agreed-upon open standard for rpc across public networks using simple transport protocols. No one else is doing this, and CORBA is web services so don't offer that up as a reply.
It WILL happen
on
Web Services
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The web will at some point be home to more metadata than html. The web at some point will traffic more bots and agents than documents.
Its silly to presume the web will remain only as a document archive with rudimentary data exchange facilities.
This is the first step to really exposing APIs over the network in a truly heterogenous fashion. It will take time, there will be major failures, and there will be a lot of hype, but it will happen.
Lest we forget, General Ishi tested chemical weapons on hundreds of thousands of Chinese in WW2. He was brought over to advance US efforts after the war, much in the same way Von Braun was brought over from Nazi Germany to advance US rocketry.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, linux has a huge amount of momentum in the open source community. Arguably it is killing even the BSDs. It is doubtful that a newly opened OS could take away much of the mindshare at this point - the people working on linux have invested to much of themselves just to drop it.
Sun is the next SGI. They're hosed.
McNealy needs to put results on the balance sheet NOW, not in two years, NOW. That means dumping anything that is not a cash cow. Shareholders want this mean's head on a plate and he can't afford to look much further than the next two quarters for some relief.
The long term vision is all well and good, but Sun stock is taking a beating, server sales are down and they are losing market share. The pressure is on McNealy to act fast to get Sun hardware and software sales up, not to promote some altruistic future vision. He knows this. So did Zander, and so did the linux guy who left. Their departures are no coincidence - look to see Sun go on the attack in the short term against anything but Sparc/Solaris. Anything but and there is going to be a shareholder revolt with McNealy's head on a plater.
Who do you think linux will destroy first...a server company or a client software/OS company?
Sun is simply in a no-win situation. They are the next SGI.
Not supporting linux means fighting not just one or two companies, but an entire economy. Intel. AMD. IBM. HP. Dell. There's just no way that Sun can win this battle. None.
The bottom line is that any platform business is hosed once their platform falls from grace. SGI is a classic example.
Sun is doomed.
In presupposing that Buran represents even a potential option for spaceflight.
First off, how is the ISS a solution to manned orbital flight??? Secondly, giving up manned spaceflight to the Russians is idiotic on many levels.
They aren't dependable.
They don't have the funding to pursue future programs.
They have nuclear weapons pointed at us.
Large scale aerospace and military projects have operated as such for decades. This really isn't news.
Its true though that all of the designs share some characteristics...one stage to get you off the gorund, one to get you into orbit. Obviously this isn't by accident...the physics of the problem and materials/fuel presently available must dictate this design.
It now sits as an amusement park exhibit that you can walk through, and as for it "not flying anymore"...well, it never really flew in the first place in a practical sense.
I don't know why people constantly bring up Buran. There is no comparison between this pseudo-prototype craft that was never practically used, and the shuttle, which has over two decades of nearly perfect mission records.
You are totally ill-informed re Buran. The Russians never made meaningful use of this design and there was only one semi-functional prototype built. You can now tour it for a few dollars outside of Moscow, but hurry up, its falling apart quickly and even the carival hucksters who own it are getting tired of it.
So please tell me why the shuttles are an embarassment. As far as I can see they're still the only space craft that lands on wheels.
For all of the posters who are going to respond with "Java can possibly be faster than C"...well, a color television could also possibly spontaneously appear at the event horizon of a black hole, but that doesn't mean that this actually ever happens.
I'm calling your bluff. Give me some stats for example programs.
Otherwise, the STL is an excellent set of libraries to move the OO paradigm towards parameterized types.
Of course like the rest of C++, you pay a price in comprehension...this language exposes everthing to you and you will pay a price in development and comprehension time.
Any dissnet at the state level is going to be overridden at the federal level. Yucca Mountain is a done deal.
We should be reducing our consumption of computing equipment, and thankfully huge performance gains in recent years allow us to own them longer.
Reuse is a great second consideration. You probably have very high standards for you computer's performance...but I bet you neighbor doesn't! GIve the damn thing away to someone who can make real use of it.
Finally recycle. A great first-step approach here would be to start a business that takes disposed of computers, strips them down and uses the parts to create ultra-low-price boxes that can be resold. For example - consider two individuals discarding PCs because of resource starvation in one aspect of their systems. Jimmy drops of a Pentium with a twenty GB hard drive. Ann drops off a PIII with hardly any disk space. Well, combine Jimmy's disk with Ann's CPU and you have the start of a PC that you could actually sell for maybe $200. Of course you would be obligated to cleanly dispose of the parts you don't use, but you get the idea. I'm surprised someone hasn't tried this.
Your post makes no sense. Look at the top ten best performing CPUs on the market. Now tell me what happened to all of these clean architectures that were supposed to destroy x86.
Whats the issue? It doesn't look like other vendors get appreciably greater performance out of "cleaner" architectures. Yes the Power4 is faster, but take that off of the list and you'll see AMD and Intel all over the performance charts.
Viruses aren't scary because we haven't put essential resources on the public network yet. Wait until your home security system is IP addressable, or any other of the countless "essentials" people plan to wire up.
The story that I heard was that this type of system had been planned for years but cabbie groups had lobbied city hall to stall it.
No one is claiming that it isn't rpc, but it is an agreed-upon open standard for rpc across public networks using simple transport protocols. No one else is doing this, and CORBA is web services so don't offer that up as a reply.
Its silly to presume the web will remain only as a document archive with rudimentary data exchange facilities.
This is the first step to really exposing APIs over the network in a truly heterogenous fashion. It will take time, there will be major failures, and there will be a lot of hype, but it will happen.